Yampa
One night in September when our phone rang at 3 a.m., I knew before I picked up that it would be my mother and that my father would have had a heart attack.
The time in my life I most wanted to be wrong, I was right. My father was in cardiac intensive care for two days before we decided to remove life support. He died peacefully and without regaining consciousness.
Now, the holidays have arrived, right on schedule as if nothing at all has changed. Shockingly enough, I don’t feel angry. Somehow, the snow still looks fresh and white, the nutmeg still smells nutty, the children are talking about Santa. And while I don’t think anyone would misunderstand and think I was glad for my father’s death, the season makes me feel of course sentimental, but also unpredictably grateful.
I’m not the sort of person who looks for silver linings or cheery afterthoughts. I can understand a little about fate and sorrow and how people respond differently to death. But I like my grief strong and straight up. I prefer wailing and cussing and punching the floor to dabbing back tears with a hankie. In a world suddenly without my sweet, protective father, I would have predicted myself writhing, cursing and carrying on – and whoever would see me so, be damned.
I expected to weep my way through the holidays. But now, instead of screaming, I keep remembering the tenderness – not hokey “I know what you’re going through” tenderness, but real honest emotion, the kind of emotion that, good or bad, is strong enough to make us want to live to taste it more.
In the ICU, when my father was being kept alive with a breathing tube, the nurse laughed with us when I propped my infant daughter up between my father’s knees on the bed and let her play there. The nurse patted my daughter’s head, then my father’s leg and she smiled with me. She also frankly answered my very specific questions about how my father would die. When I lifted his eyelids a last time for some vague reason I couldn’t explain, even to myself, she said quietly, “He knows that you’re here.”
And, even when he was unresponsive to any neurological input, she continued to address my father by name, letting him know what she was doing, saying, “There’s going to be a little stick now, Bob,” or “I’m just going to take your temperature,” every time she approached him.
My mother, my sister and her baby girl, my brother and his wife, and my little girl and I were all in the room as the nurse went about the procedures of removing life support. “Such a handsome man,” she said. When she removed the tape that had been holding the breathing tube in my father’s mouth she told him, “I’m sorry this is pulling on your beard.” And when she administered the last pain medications and pulled the IV needle from his arm, tears ran down her cheeks.
That nurse was one of several I remember in complete wonder. I stand in admiration and respect of a person willing to do emotionally delicate, intellectually demanding, intensely human work. We hung on the nurse’s words and her compassion, even as we focused on my father’s final breaths.
Of course, for my family, holidays will never be the same. He won’t be here to put the lights on the tree. At the big meal, toward the end when the gravy and a little stain from the cranberries and a smear of butter are all that’s left, there will be the blank moment when my father is supposed to quote some line, I think it’s from Huck Finn, something about juices all getting together and swapping around on the plate. My father won’t say it this year, and even though I never paid attention when he did say it, I’ll wish that he’d say it again.
The situation smacks of irony, like just about everything else about death.
My family will miss my father, and we’ll still love him. People will be overcome by small, personal tragedies even in a large, violent world. Little children will sit with dying men. In times of duress, we’ll bond with strangers. The holidays will come, and come again. I’ll fill to bursting with the kindness of the world, just when I think I should be screaming.
Kate Krautkramer is an essayist and teacher.
